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One response to “links for 2008-03-08”

1. 2008/03/08

   Geoff Arnold

   I assume that “punt to G”is “punt to Geoff”. Thanks a bunch. Why theists should think that atheists share their conviction that there is something called “moral truth” escapes me. The Barefoot Bum has a nicely relevant piece in which he demolishes Kant (another ontological idealist) by showing how evolution kills those a priori arguments:

   ut someone of Kant’s time precedes Darwin, and Darwin makes all the difference. Because, of course, it becomes a plausible counter-argument to say that our true synthetic “a priori” beliefs are actually a posteriori with respect to the experience of evolution. Our brains, far from being engines of “pure” reason, have been shaped by at least 500,000,000 years of multicellular evolution (and perhaps even by the full 4,000,000,000 years of the evolution of terrestrial life). Evolution is not only undeniably an experiential process, it is also scientific. The parallels are exact: theoretical structure = genome; creation of hypotheses = random mutation; acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses by experiment = natural selection.

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